The goal of this research is to perfect quantitative methods for the physical characterization of simple DNAs and to extend thermal denaturation methods by combining efficient approaches to the mapping of thermalites with additional information about the composition and sequence biases within thermalites to obtain a new type of description for genomic units, to be referred to as the "sequence constitution." It is theorized that the sequence constitution may emphasize features of the base pair sequence that are related to the control functions of the nucleic acid. We plan to use single strand reagents and polarographic studies to correlate the presence of unique tertiary structural features at premelting temperatures with deductions about sequence constitution arrived at by thermal denaturation analysis. In addition, working in collaboration with a theoretician, we hope to refine existing theory on the mechanism of helix coil transitions in DNA.